Hi Jay,
Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!
We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.
We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.
Important note!
Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.
If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.
Okay, let’s get started!
The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.
We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.
Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.
The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.
Regarding passion you picked Stage 1: I’m equally interested in pretty much everything but not especially committed to any one interest .
Regarding perseverance you picked .
As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.
Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.
In week 2, we looked at your interests.
Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.
Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.
Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.
In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.
You said your top three values were universalism, self-direction, and stimulation.
You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.
When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.
You said your top three talents were analytic, social, and kinesthetic.
We then talked about goal hierarchies.
You said you had a general intuition (but nothing specific yet) about your top-level goal.
We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.
A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to finishing my thesis topic and research .
Here is how self-concordant that goal was:
Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.
It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!
Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.
We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:
Work Smart
In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.
You WOOPed!
For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Planning my committee’s schedule for the rest of the semester .
For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said I’ll feel relaxed .
For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Ideation, indecisiveness .
For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When chapter is over, then I’ll meet with the committee members .
Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.
And here’s how much you learned
These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.
The important thing is that you learn something along the way!
In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.
You shared you’ve done daily practice in Sports .
We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.
In week 8, we discussed feedback.
Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!
You said you felt Intrigued when receiving critical feedback, and Intrigued when receiving positive feedback.
We then turned to learning about stress.
In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being school .
We also talked about adversity and failure.
Although related, adversity and failure are different:
Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.
However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…
Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.
And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.
We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.
Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.
You describe the habit you chose as Health .
Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.
Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?
So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.
In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.
Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.
Here’s how you described them:
You also wrote a gratitude letter to Manager .
In one word, you said it made you feel Happy .
One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.
… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.
Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.
![]()
Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?
Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.
| |
| Journeys never have to end, but destination might be reached. One can keep passion and one can break it |
| Goals need to be compartmentalized into tiers. Just focusing on high level goals is bad for attainment, lower and intermediate goals are needed |
| Visualize the obstacle and plan for your goal. It will make you more succesful |
| Perfect practice makes perfect - be deliberate in practice and incorporate some stretch goals |
| Criticize the past but also criticize a potential future |
| Stress is neither good or bad - it depends on your perspective |
| I shouldn't rely on willpower, I should work smarter |
| Finding a good mentor(s) is important |
| Everybody is a taker, matcher, and giver, and it's important to understand the issues with each position |
In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.
Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:
| |
| Sydney Liu |
| Jay brings a relaxed and thoughtful energy to our team. He brings a unique perspective as someone from a small town in Kansas. Jay is an attentive listener, and I was always impressed by the incredibly thoughtful feedback he adds to our discussions. He frequently draws interesting connections to facets of his life, a book he's read, a quote he's heard, and more. He is humble and self aware, and he is surprisingly sweet and supportive. It's heartwarming to hear him talk fondly about mentoring the brothers in his fraternity, or about his close relationship with his teacher back in his small-town high school. Jay is always very motivated, actively seeks feedback, and desires to grow.
Jay did his discovery project on Chess, and I really enjoyed hearing his progress. He's an engaging public speaker, and it was wonderful to hear him talk candidly about his journey through chess.
He talked about how he always enjoyed strategic video games, but never thought about playing Chess until now. He's put in a lot of time and deliberate practice into this hobby, and I think that highlights his love of learning and persistence. He also talked about the social aspect of Chess, and how it's helped him meet others and form quick friendships. Jay is great, and I'm sure he'll go on to do great things!
|
| Madeline Kohn |
| Jay is incredibly warm and outgoing. He has clearly undergone a lot of personal development, and was always very open about experiences and lessons learned. His commitment to self-improvement, especially regarding habit building and personal well-being raised the bar for our team discussions. He is very dedicated to his frat and would often share about ways he was helping others out or giving back to that community. Furthermore, he had a lot of perspective as a senior and was very generous with advice on work ethic and attitude towards school.
Jay's discovery project was about learning to play chess. It is very telling that one of his main goals for learning this game was to be able to play with others. Furthermore, Jay was very open that even though he hasn't yet gotten very good at chess, and would often lose, he deeply enjoyed the learning process. True to his goals of growth and learning, he was thrilled to say he was improving his skills and creating new avenues for connection with those he cares about. |
| Ojasvi Rana |
| Jay is a lovely fellow, an all around great guy and upstanding citizen of his community. He moves through the world with grace and respect and is easy to have a candid conversation with. I recall him telling us about how he makes an effort to reach out to the new guys in his frat, and how as a result he becomes like a big brother and mentor to them. I think this story perfectly captures Jay as a person; I think both benevolence and universalism are among his top values. I wish him every success and happiness in life as he moves forward to the next chapter.
I remember in week 1 and 2, Jay was considering different options for his discovery project like woodworking. I was pleasantly surprised to learn later on that he decided to tackle chess, because it uses mental faculties rather than physical. I feel like by doing so he took a step outside his comfort zone and embraced the exploratory nature of the discovery project. I also love how he connected learning technical knowledge of chess with the community aspect of it; playing with his friends online and offline. It seems like this aligns with his values I mentioned above, hence chess could be something he can pursue as a passion project in the future. |
We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.
Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?
Drumroll please…
Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.
In any case, grit is not built in a day…
…remember that progress is never smooth…
…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.
With grit and gratitude,
Angela and the Grit Lab team.